It was piracy on the high seas that drove the infant United States into its first foreign war. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to London to negotiate with the Barbary States, which had been kidnapping American sailors. The U.S., they said, was a new nation, and had done the people of North Africa no wrong. The Tripolitanian representative, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, told them in reply: “It is written in the Koran that all nations which have not acknowledged the Prophet are sinners, whom it is the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.”